A very valid question

question was posted by pritesh, but went to drafts instead of posts.soi i reposted it...

Well, Archana posted a question in the comments section and since I'm a contributor to the Blog, I post it here and try to answer it, at the same time. My perspective, of course!!!! So, here's the questionIn India there are lots of languages,and that is quite obvious as it is a very big region.But can you imagine there is different language both in terms of accent and vocabulary at every 30 km.Why is it so? Does it indicate lack of communication or lack of sharing or mere stubbornness for not to adopt to the other villager's language ?Does it indicate higher pride attached to the features of small group of people in one village ?This situation existed in spite of the places are far near and accessible with the slowest means of communication such as bullock cart existed during old days.What could have been the reason? does it not indicate an unique psychological aspect of human nature?...i hope the question does not violate the original theme of the blog.Well, to begin with, I don't think anything violates this blog as far as it's offensive, which I don't think this question is. In fact, it's quite valid. There may be many answers to this question. My perspective is that this is promarily beceause of the inherent TOLERANCE factor of Indian mentality. And for and explanation of THAT, I have to go back in time.I attended a talk sometime back by a person titled: Why Science developed in Paris and US and not in Beijing and Patna?

nature of question

i know the purpose of this blog. as said ealier by sujit in nature of question but no new post in last 4 months. can we have multidisciplinary discussion on novel topic?
i am doing phd on cancer. can discuss things with you!
would like to hear from you people too!!

Rectangular World!

Hi,
I am posting on behalf of Tathagat Bhattacharya. I've already sent him an invite. Hopefully, we're going to have him among us as a primary contributer soon. But, till then, here's a very good question he asked:

Since I don't have the privilege to post in this blog, I am posting a question through the comments box:
Why are most of the objects around us rectangular in shape? If you look around within your house, the cot, the walls, the cupboard, the calender, the TV, the fridge etc etc all are rectangular in shape. The list is un-ending. Does anyone have a clue?

To this our very own genius Karthik gave a very creative answer:

I guess most things are rectangular by design. If they were round, for instance, they would roll away and we would have to keep bringing them back to their original positions:)


HAHAHA! :D

Nature of Questions

Dear friends,
Going through the nature of discussions that we have had in this group so far, I feel, we have asked and answered really good questions. But my apprehension is that most of us haven't yet got the essence of the blog. Let me draw your attention back to the title of the blog: Embarrassing Questions! :)

The question being good doesn't really qualify it for this board. The question should be as utterly embarrassing to the person asking as possible. In other words, it should be a hole one had left in their school studies. A question like 'Is Pythagorus Theorem' a theorem or an axiom is a very apt question. Similarly, 'Why do the angles of a triangle add up to pi radians?'

There are large number of questions which we might be asking and it might be our credit to be doing so. That's why we are researchers. Aren't we? Here we should try to ask questions which earn us no credit because they should've got cleared in the school studies itself, but are possibly open to many of us.

Ya, that's the idea. Refrain from asking esoteric, highly philosophical or open research questions. We can have another platform for that. :)

Chicken

Why did the chicken cross the road?

The Mind's I

This is one wonderful book. If you have not read it/ read any chapters from it, take my word - you will enjoy it.

Following is a short excerpt from the introduction from this book-

It does seem (doesn't it?) that if your brain were transplanted into another body, you would go with it. But are you a brain? Try on two sentences, and see which one sounds more like the truth to you:

I have a brain.
I am a brain.

Sometimes we talk about smart people being brains, but we don't mean it literally. We mean they have good brains. You have a good brain, but who or what then, is the you that has the brain?

...

Our world is filled with things that are neither mysterious and ghostly nor simply constructed out of the building blocks of physics. Do you believe in voices? How about haircuts? Are there such things? Wgat are they? What, in the language of the physicist, is a hole -- not an exotic black hole, but just a hole in a piece of cheese, for instance? Is it a physical thing? Latin still exists, but it is no longer a living language. The language of the cavepeople of France no longer exists at all. The game of bridge is less than a hundred years old. What sort of thing it is? It is not animal, vegetable, or mineral....

In one of the essays, the author ponders upon the physical location of mind in the human body. He hypothesises an experiment. It goes like this -

Assume that the medical technology has reached to an incredibly sophistication. 'They' can now track and monitor every single neuron of the human brain and can actually kind of 'tap' the brain. The experimental setup involves none other than yourself! They have taken the brain out of your head (believe it or not!) and by means of electrical wires they have connected your brain to your nervous system. You are perfectly alright even now. You can control all your limbs - you can see and hear. Just like a normal being. Only difference is that the brain has been taken out of your head.

Having taken out the brain, and successfully isolated your body from your brain, they have decided to keep it in one glass jar (like those in science fiction movies).

The question to answer is if the brain is kept in a jar that faces the rest of the body, and if your eyes can actually see your brain, can you still say that mind is different from the brain? Where are mind's signals originating from?

Now, come come - I can already hear you all saying, "hey are you out of your mind or what?". Well I am not, just to be on the record :)

Here we go!

So, here's the first question.
Why doesn't the electron fall into the nucleus?